A browser tooltip: one of those annoyingly, informative little yellow boxes that magically appears when your mouse hovers over certain interface items. Some people like them, but I am one of those that doesn’t like them in the browser. But how do you get rid of them in Safari or Firefox? There is no simple preferences selection to disable them. But it can be done.

First, to disable in Safari, open up the Terminal application (in Applications/Utilities folder) and paste the following:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitShowsURLsInToolTips 0

Press enter, quit and restart Safari. To re-enable tooltips, same command except change the 0 to 1.

Now for Firefox. In the address bar, type about:config. Click the “I’ll be careful” button if it appears. In the filter box, type browser.chrome to find browser.chrome.toolbar_tips which should have a value of true. Just double-click to change to false and close that tab or window so that you don’t accidentally do something “not careful.”